bother us, not even us kids. Humans are fun to play with. We've had a great time teaching you tricks!'
She laughed warmly, then grew serious.
'Then something that we hadn't really expected happened. One of the big things about what you call magic is that it takes life force to create life force-I mean, it can be amplified or converted, but not actually created. Back home, they breed a sort of hive beastie. Lots of individual bodies, one big life-form. We could 'kill' pieces of it, but it was only like trimming toenails, you see? It died out quick here, and then we actually had to sacrifice animals, harvest their life force.'
'Santeria?' Twan asked.
'And the rest. All magic spread out from Africa. A lot of your magicians don't really remember anything; it's like cargocult magic and aeronautics. But we were the beginning. Through sacrifices and rituals-'
'Rituals?'
'Certainly,' the were-dolphin said patiently. 'Imagine, for example, a cube…' The water fluxed, and a glistening, rubbery cube of water popped up from the surface of the lagoon. It floated there, suspended apparently by the force of mind alone. 'Now, divide it into octants…' Concentrating, the Nommo put on an amazing display, dividing the cube of water into ever more complex geometric shapes, while keeping it suspended above the surface. It finally evolved into a crystal castle, its component shapes rotating, dancing, and dividing all at the same time. Her blue-black face was screwed up in concentration.
Then with a tinkle the entire structure dissolved, the castle crashed back into the water, and the older male slapped his tail repeatedly on the water, applauding her performance. It sounded like a chorus of cherry bombs.
'What was that?' Bishop asked, for once impressed.
'An advanced exercise.'
'Needs work,' the male said lazily.
She stuck out her tongue at him. 'Anyhow, it's one of the mental exercises that calls up the Ethereals, and some of the other powers.'
'What about the sacrifice?'
'Our ancestors laid this big trip on you guys: it is like ultra cool to sacrifice animals with big brains. But we couldn't be everywhere at once, and some of you guys tumbled to the fact that the smarter the beastie, the more you can milk its pain.'
Twan seemed to be studying the ground as she spoke. 'And conscious animals, like human beings, would be the most powerful yet.'
Bishop and Twan looked at each other simultaneously. 'Excuse me,' Bishop said. 'But wouldn't the sacrifice of Nommo-of your own kind be the most powerful of all?'
'Gag me with a jellyfish. That's like disgusting.' She smiled upon them as if they were simple-minded children. Her expression reminded Griffln of one of his aunts. A woman who could look straight at the truth and not see it, blinded by the light of her own assurance that The World Doesn't Work That Way.
Bishop was thinking again. 'If you kill the creature quickly you release all of the energy. How about slowly?'
The Nomrno grimaced. 'I don't even want to talk about it.'
Twan was aghast. 'You're suggesting this is the real reason for torture?'
'Have you just got to hear this? All right, all right. You people look so funny, act so friendly, but you get hooked on that death-energy stuff so easy, it's scary. Do you realize that your planet's most popular religion uses an act of torture as its central symbol?
'We did what we could, you know. Kept you in small groups. Limited the techno stuff. Tried for centuries. Results, zip. We kept really nasty weapons from being developed in Africa, but the rest of the world just…' She trailed off.
Bishop's eyebrows flew up. 'Prez would have loved this. Africa was conquered and colonized because you limited their technology?'
'Mea culpa. Like, 'oops, we're sorry.' We folded our tents and snuck away in the night.'
'We didn't forget you,' the male said. 'We watched. And when you developed some heavyweight tech of your own, we figured, Hey! Maybe we can get home now. The children, anyway. We still had that crashed shuttle offshore from Cameroon.
'So we traded little teensy bits of magic and got our worshipers back. It was easy; our families had been in the god biz for generations, after all. We got our shuttle repaired enough to hover. Got this building partially constructed and then walled in the shuttle in the dead of night.'
'What happened?'
'We were too late. That big collapse came, you know? We saved as many of our people as we could, but…' She shook her head. 'We just don't have the technical skills here to finish the repair job.'
'Why don't you control this entire building?' Griffin asked.
'The Mayombreros. Bad dudes, man. They know all the oogy sacrifice stuff. It's been all we could do to keep 'em at the bottom. They need the roof folks to grow fresh food, roof needs the basement for power-for a long time it worked out.'
'You know,' Twan said. 'Our enclaves have powerful scientists, but we lack power. Perhaps together…'
Mgui-Smythe was nervous. He'd run stress-analysis programs under a wide variety of assumptions. His crew had shored up the walls and floors of MIMIC until they were twice as strong as the computers said they needed to be. Still, what they were about to do was way outside standard engineering texts.
On the plus side: if MIMIC stood up to this, the building would take anything the Barsoom Project might require of it.
Sections of both the ninth and tenth levels of MIMIC had been flooded. All furniture and statuary on the submerged floor of the tenth were constructed of light, breakaway material, weighted with sandbags. Even the IFGS had finally, reluctantly, given their approval.
The floors of the first ten levels were all retractable, intended to allow the construction of enormous machinery. Under the right circumstances, they could accommodate whole rocket engines and shuttle craft. They could also survive the calculated insanity of Dream Park.
The countdown began.
Bishop held quite still, just sensing, not reacting, as the walls began to rumble. Griffin thrashed about in the water. The water was carrying vibrations through his whole body, humming in his bones. 'What in the hell-'
And then the very floor beneath them gave way, and they plunged screaming into darkness.
32
Friday, July 22, 2059 2:12 P.M.
Al the Barbarian heard a sort of magnified gurgle. His nimble fingers froze, then tucked his nearly finished weapon into a plastic bag in his day pack. Al's guilty conscience would have flinched at any sound. Someone must have seen! He was doing black voodoo here.
He twisted the bag and sealed it, one-handed. The floor was singing against his bare feet. Other Gamers were listening for a gurgle that was becoming a roar The surface of the pool lurched down by six inches, as if the bottom had been ripped out.
The water foamed and churned hideously, and a gigantic whirlpool formed. Beach boys and bunnies thrashed toward the nearest ladders and were dragged down, drowning.
In Engineering, a team of experts led by Ashly Mgui-Smythe oversaw the massive water dump. Sluice vents fanned open at MIMIC's base. Thousands of gallons a second flooded out onto the desert floor.
When supports for the tenth level's sliding floor were withdrawn, the Gamers fell down into the ninth, also half-filled with water. Every object they could possibly bump into was either soft, slick, rounded, or all three. The
